Academics report feeling unable to cope in the managerialised university. To confirm these feelings are symptoms of managerialism's tightening grip, we use Bourdieusian concepts of field and capital to compare academics and professional staff experiential statements in an Australian university. We compare their field conditions and examine how their differences enable or hinder the accumulation of capital that defines their field. Findings show that managerialism requires professional staff to share work tasks and be on-campus, which enables them to accumulate the capital they require. Managerialism also permits and resources academics to working out-of-office to accumulate their required capital. Consequentially though, university operational knowledge becomes informal and only accessible to professional staff who accumulate the required social capital to access it. Professional staff are thus fishin-water; easily accumulating social capital through dayto-day activities. But academics become fish-out-of-water (office); they flounder to access operational knowledge, which leads to feelings of not coping.
This study examines the historical role preparation experiences of professional staff and academics in a managerialised university field. Semi-structured interviews were used to identify the impact of these experiences on the individual's ability to ‘play the game’ of the managerialised university field. The Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, doxa and illusio were used to analyse the data. The results showed that professional staff had a more advantageous position in the managerialised university field due to their pre-existing mastery of the rules of the game, which was attributed to their similarly structured educative role preparation experiences. Conversely, academics had a less advantageous position due to their lack of understanding of the managerialised nature of the university administrative field. This manifests as a heterodoxy, in which academics feel abandoned, disregarded and subordinated by managerial orthodoxy. The results of this case study reveal that managerialised universities in the Anglosphere are in crisis. It is argued that recognising academic heterodoxy could pave the way for their situation to alter and improve.
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